1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming system comprising, for example, a document server, clients, and image forming devices, and to devices used with the image forming system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, users have performed image forming by selecting a desired printer from a computer and causing the selected printer to print a certain job via an general-purpose interface such as a LAN or an interface using dedicated hardware.
Also, a system called server-client, wherein jobs of client users are sent to printers via a document server, is also widely known.
Further, in recent years, cases wherein image forming devices print great numbers of jobs from a computer in a light-printing market called print-on-demand are increasing, so means for printing great numbers of jobs as efficiently as possible are in demand.
To this end, a server capable of handling great numbers of jobs and multiple image forming devices connected thereto are necessary, since having one job printed by one image forming device is inefficient. Also, when performing great numbers of prints, there is the need to manage and efficiently operate the state of multiple image forming devices, thus necessitating a high-performance controller. Accordingly, systems are being built wherein high-performance computers are used as servers, with the computer also having controller functions.
However, server functions and controller functions provided by computers are often of software configurations. Also, when the computer and image forming devices are connected by a general-purpose interface, copying software to other computers allows server functions and controller functions to be provided to the computer without authorization, which can then print with the image forming devices.